That's a pretty spectacular machine. I suppose the price is largely justified in that it probably reduced manpower considerably with its mass processing.
bigclivedotcom This machine is made by ABX S.A.S a french company from the south of France. As such french engineer cost a lot.. and we have I think the hugest tax and social stuff etc..That company has less then 600 employees. It's not a mass producing stuff. R&D is french and that company was created in 1987. you can expect high standards but hence the huge price.( ABX last year turn over about 120 Millions euros, and its capital is 24millions euros which means they only produce about 50 units of blood analyser per month). ABX was bought by Horiba in 1996 but the product is actually an ABX analyser. Oh yeah also that explains why there is french label in the machine.
If you put the chassis in a big display case and used modern (3D printer style) controllers and drivers to just randomly move stuff about, it would make a great techno-art exhibit. (Or even a museum exhibit.)
GadgetUK164 Agreed. Tubing, syringes, etc. act as a protective vessel for pathogens, shielding them from all the hash environmental conditions, even without that protection, some pathogens can survive for months. Since lab got rid of this machine, it probably stopped working, so there's a good chance it was probably never properly flushed with a cleaning\sanitizing solution, and even if it was flushed, some blood over time leaks into all the little seams of separators and whatnot, not affecting accuracy of the machine, because pass-throughs and hoses are flushed, but posing a risk of infection to a person disassembling and playing with those components. Also, when you disassemble even small things, it's not uncommon to scratch or cut yourself, especially when we're dealing with razor sharp punched panels, so it's better to use thick rubber gloves when disassembling such things, and a faceshield, in case some nasty shit (chemical or contaminated liquid) gets sprayed straight in your face, being extra cautious when cutting hoses. But I believe people should stop with all the fearmongering. Mike is a grown-up man, it's a little bit disrespectful to treat him like a child, he knows what he's doing, and he knows what's best for him. Maybe he simply doesn't care, maybe he consulted medical professionals from whom he acquired this machine and knows there's little to no risk of infection, and maybe he blasted it with UV before touching all the insides, maybe he took a lot of extra precautions, it's a video, we don't know what actually had happened behind the scenes ;)
Well said! My comment wasn't really aimed at Mike but rather people watching the video. Nothing wrong with a bit of common sense approach to safety and I'me sure Mike was careful and took the precautions he felt fit, but others might not unless it's pointed out, despite it seeming obvious to some people. It's a bit like High Voltage stuff, some times people forget to point out the risks and inexperienced people try for themselves and 1 or 2 of them get shocks.
jacklabite Without going into exotic stuff, lets take something very common like tuberculosis for example, it can survive (remain viable) for up to 6 months without any protection.
Hey Mike, I know I'm not your mother but please wear some gloves while handling this thing! HIV can be viable up to a month outside the body and hepatitis B+C for up to 8 months! Looks like everything there is dried out but still. With that aside I love your videos, please never stop making them :)
Now that is the sort of thing I like taking apart. Medical, Army and Industrial all have the most interesting tech. Would be fun to find and power up the laser might even be a tube type looking at the date codes on some of the chips.
Amazing, no wonder this cost so much. Such a low volume of incredibly complicated machinery. You're doing god's work here Mike, keep up the great videos!
Yet one more suggestion to wear gloves. I was once involve in biomedical engineering and it was drummed into us the risks. Hepatitis B for example can survive upwards of 40 days on a dry surface. Fungal spores far longer. A fellow I worked with contracted a rare tropical skin disease from the inside of a high speed centrifuge. I also have no idea what these reagents in the machine are. One example is dialysis machines. Most hospitals have one or two reserved for patients who have aids or any form of hepatitis. The machines are well cleaned after each use but if you get inside the guts of it and remove one of the hoses its not uncommon to find dried blood trapped near the clamp. I have no idea if that presents a risk but I am not willing to risk it. I was a big chicken I always used gloves.
Holy moly, that thing is a surplus jackpot. At first i was wondering why you would spend a couple hundred dollars on it, but now it's clear. $200K per sounds expensive, but imagine the costs to put that thing together and getting it certified by whatever standards bodies might be interested in it. If you had to start from scratch you would almost certainly still be losing money at 400 units sold.
An electromechanical wonderland. having sold only 40 of these, I wonder if how much profit they made considering all the design effort that had to go into this? This looks immensely complex. I am going to guess these required a lot of periodic maintenance and calibration.
Wow dude, very brave to take it apart! I would not even touch it, medical stuff always scares me for some reason. Hope you washed your hands after the process!
Although I agree you should be wearing gloves (if you ever walk through a pathology department where on a daily basis HIV Positive samples pass through you would want to wear gloves for everything!) It should be noted that this unit could potentially be a unit designed more for installation in a department away from pathology, for example, Emergency Departments(A&E) have these types of units, it saves having to send samples up to pathology... if this is one of them units it will likely have some quite advanced self cleaning(you cant expect a doctor/nurse to clean it them self!) to prevent against cross contamination/false readings being generated by remittance of the previous sample. Interesting tear down!
Peter Carlson Ethylene oxide sounds nasty, wouldn't they have to remove dangerous chemicals like that before selling the machine or inform the person they were selling it to that it may contain hazardous chemicals?
Coolkeys2009 nah, it's not that bad. Not only is it used in hospitals to sterilize equipment, to ripen fruit out of season, it is naturally emitted by fruit as soon as you pluck it from the plant. It is the reason why if you put over ripened fruit in the same container with fresh fruit, all of the fruit will prematurely over ripen. In fact those thin crinkly produce bags they have on a roll at grocery stores are specifically designed to be gas permeable by ethylene oxide to keep your fruits and vegetables fresh longer. It's pretty benign stuff.
@lan party hosting there is a place for a bottle of cleaner on top of the machine by the reagent bottles, which is obviously run through the tubes to clear any contamination between sample analysis.
Please Mike, be careful and wear gloves - we need you! Ubicom was the successor to Scenix and SX28 was a high speed (about 50MHz to 100MHz clock) pseudo clone of the old PIC16C5x series.
Very cool! I would love to get my hands on something like that for a teardown. You could easily get 5 or 6 videos out of that unit depending on how detailed you want to get. There is quite a bit of complexity in that main control unit not to mention a lot of very nice parts!
I was at an event tonight and saw the host organisation's Amnis ImageStream-X MarkII (ISX MKII) imaging flow cytometry machine, which reminded me of this video. I would have loved to see the innards.
How does it stop the blood samples getting mixed up with so much tubing? Does it flush the whole system with water or some sort of cleaner after each analysts?
+Is200Innit yes, the system flushes with a special and doubtless expensive cleaning fluid, there is a space for a cleaner supply bottle next to the reagent supply bottles.
At around 8:50 when you are raising/lowering the disc and arms for the carousel, as you spin it there were a small bank of led's that briefly lit and died with each turn of the shaft. Was that self-powered, or was there a capacitor that was still charged? This video is fascinating!
Very interesting piece of gear. I can only imagine assembling all that. That's why there is such a huge price attached to it. On a side-note: you might want to wear gloves.
jmc0070 dave is/was an engineer to Nicola Staub that what i was trying to say the content is really interesting but the way it is presented isnt that good IMHO
If it's about $214,000, then why are lab tests so expensive? For something that is probably used non-stop every day in a lab, you would think they wouldn't have any problems making back the cost, and yet the last time I had blood drawn the bill came to almost $800...
1974Alfa5Spd I guess you missed the multiple parts of the video, where consumeables are mentioned, and forgot that there still has to be someone, who checks the slides under a microscope.
They charge you $800 because they can get away with it. The competition in the medical industry is only skin deep. It is even kinda evident from how massively under optimized this piece of kit is for the price tag of 4 family cars.
Because you live in the USA and medical related costs are arbitrarily expensive. They know you need it, so they make sure they bleed as much money as they can from you.
Walter Boxhead LOL :) yeah but the result is that to pay the 600 employees with huge social benefits here in France and the engineer the french company that made this device had to bill it over 200 K . but sure then test made with this machine here cost about 50 euros ( this machine only does basic blood analysis : NFS , sedimentation and those test are around 50).
is it bad to be excited to see more? also consider this. some poor bastard DESIGNED this machine(most likely a team) someone had to also draw all those tubes and cables and connectors to right places, goodness me
No way, that machine has much more than > 2k in parts alone, and saves hundreds of hours of manpower to do lab work automatically in a self contained unit many times smaller than a whole room full of people and microscopes it used to take. That and it's a device for a very niche market. While every home may need a tv, not home will ever need one of these devices
CKOD but there would be no profit, nor a profit motive which would (according to the irs) make it a hobby and have devastating financial repercussions for the company to the point where the company would have to expend cash stocks out of their own pockets just to stay alive. Medical equipment is in the same fiscal ideology. It costs a lot, but it saves such a HUGE amount of manual labor and requires so much engineering that it is a bargain at 200k. Let alone this unit is only 4 or 5 years old and is technologically obsolete already! when it comes to medical technology you don't want the cure of yesteryear (think lobotomy for a cure to depression) you want the best one you can afford, and at 500-800$ per test the machine quickly pays for itself in the speed in which it operates.
CKOD I understood, but people come to videos like these to learn, and while mike is a great engineer the video doesn't explain the pricing of these things although he shows the price
Sexy kit! Somewhat useless when broken except for the diy parts...but still very cool to see how much engineering goes into these 'medical magic' devices...Worth $220k? seems like it.
Ghastly machine to use. I never had to touch one but my colleagues would be swearing at it daily over its many failings. The servicing engineers would be a the lab on a weekly basis. A lot of samples needed repeat analysis as the results were never good. Believe me, my colleagues would happily take a sledgehammer to one for the amount of hassle they caused.
A whole bunch of snowflakes on here talking about gloves. It's just a drop of blood FFS. What would you lot do if you were involved in a car accident or something with blood sprayed everywhere?
